Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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EVENTS

Random Health Care Reform Crap in my Tabs

Here’s another rundown of the random crap that’s started to accumulate in my Firefox tabs, to do with the American health care war being waged presently between people who want people to have access to health care, and people who want to continue denying access to health care in order to make a profit.

Thom Hartman has an idea: let all Americans buy into Medicare. Since Medicare works, why not just expand it, instead of a whole new system? Though I’m of the belief that this reform would not go far enough to remedy the health-care-for-profit setup that the free market has saddled you with, one must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. It would be a start, and certainly a hell of a lot less government-expanding. The only problem would be the refrain of “where will you get the money?”

To which I answer, try actually taxing people on more than their first $90,000 dollars in the social security tax cap. Yes, the rich pay higher taxes already, but guess what? They only pay that higher tax on the first tiny sliver of their multimillion dollar incomes! Plus, the capital gains tax was lowered from 20% for the higher tax brackets down to 15% in 2003, and look what happened to the economy. Lower income significantly, AND increase spending by a trillion dollars on a needless war? Gee, let’s ask Paulson or some other Bush crony what they think might happen! The Teabaggers who complain about this idea would see absolutely no increase in their own taxation rates, as they are by no stretch of the imagination rich enough to qualify for these higher taxes. This smacks of “eat the rich”, but honestly, how many millions do you need? Can’t you spare a bit of your walking-around, pocket-change, latte-money as part of your social contract with the country that provided you the opportunity to GET rich?

Greg Laden’s noticed a trend, at the same time: the deathers, the birthers, the teabaggers and the people who conflate Obama with Hitler are incredibly endemically racist, and are using their favorite conspiracies to cover up this fact about themselves. People who sidestep the issue of race are no better, as they are tacitly allowing the retardery to perpetuate.